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Asus have adopted a black and blue colour scheme for the Asus M5A99X EVO. The PCB itself is black and the board has a combination of black, blue and white fittings.
There is a substantial heatsink to the left of the CPU socket which will help to cool the power regulation circuitry supplying the CPU. The chipset is located just below the power regulation circuitry and is covered with a similarly styled blue heatsink. Asus haven't placed the heatsinks too close to the CPU socket so there shouldn't be any issues installing CPU coolers of any size. We used a Noctua NH-D14 for testing which fitted easily.
We find the 8-pin power connector for the CPU nestled just above the heatsink, along the top edge of the board in close proximity to the CPU socket.
All four of the DDR3 memory slots are located just to the right of the CPU socket and are black and blue in colour highlighting the different channels.
Be warned that large CPU coolers such as the Noctua NH-D14 will obstruct some of these RAM slots, so low profile memory may be required. The board supports up to 32 GB of unbuffered memory running at speeds of 2133 (OC)/1866/1600/1333/1066 MHz in a dual channel configuration.
The internal USB3.0 header is located just underneath the memory slots, which isn't ideal for most cases as it can be difficult to route cables neatly. We would have preferred to see this located along the bottom edge of the motherboard. We also find the 24-pin power connector and a 3-pin fan header adjacent to the memory slots.
Moving further down the right hand side of the motherboard we find the eight SATA ports in total. Six of these are SATA-600 ports connected to the AMD SB950 controller which support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The two remaining SATA-300 ports are connected to the JMicron JMB362 controller which also feeds the onboard eSATA ports.
Along the bottom edge of the motherboard we find all the front panel headers. These include an HD Audio connector, three USB2.0 connectors a fan header and the front panel switch and LED connectors. We also find a further 3-pin fan header and switches for the TPU and EPU here.
There are three PCI Express x16 slots on the motherboard in total. The top two will only run at x16 if there is a single graphics card installed in the system and will switch down to x8 with dual graphics cards installed. The motherboard supports both Quad SLI and Quad CrossfireX. The third runs in x4 mode when three cards are installed. In addition to the three PCI Express x16 slots, there are two PCI Express x1 slots and a single legacy PCI slot.
The rear I/O panel supports:
- 1x PS2 connector keyboard/mouse combo port
- 1x eSATA 3 GB/s
- 1x Power eSATA 3 GB/s
- 1x IEEE 1394a
- 1x LAN (RJ45) port
- 2x USB3.0 ports
- 8x USB2.0 ports
- 1x Optical S/PDIF out
- 6x Audio jacks
I wouldnt touch AMD for a processor/motherboard combo. They arent bad chips but Intel are competitvely priced and faster. AMD should drop prices by 20%.
amd is running a uk cashback deal on the fx and a series at the moment. they’re calling it “more cores – more cashback” or something really similar.
10£ for a quad core, 15 for hexa, and 20 for octo. this would bring the price to 115£. furthermore, im pretty damn sure that you should be able to find a better deal on it than 135£, and the cashback is directly from amd, so i doubt the choice of retailer will matter much.
Yeah it was posted yesterday http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/kgnewsbot/amd-to-give-money-back-for-buying-fx-and-apu-processors/
its still not enough.
And the deal doesnt help americans. im pissed off , I bought a FX8150 a few weeks ago and it should be $15 less already. they are too expensive but im an AMD loyalist, although that might change soon if they look after customers like this.
I like their processors, they are good value for money
horribly inefficient. twice the physical cores for less performance at the same price, with higher power consumption. its a win !
@WarrenUK
You are wrong here. First of all, AMD has 2x the integer core count . Where FX8120 loses to 2500K is in FP intensive workloads. No surprise there since FX has ONE FP unit per core pair,thus 4 FP units in “octo” core chip. Each of these units is on par (execution resources wise) as each of 2500K cores(Which have unified scheduler for integer and fp ops).
So to sum up:
FX8120 : 3.1Ghz stock clock,3.4Ghz all core turbo,4.2Ghz single core turbo. 8 integer cores,4 FP units each of which is 256bits wide(1×256 or 2x128bit depending on ISA).If AVX is used AMD can execute 4x256bit AVX ops.If FMA4 is used it can double the effective throughput putting it on par with 2500K’s AVX256bit throughput(only in this case).
2500K : 3.3Ghz stock clock,3.5?Ghz all core turbo,3.7Ghz single core turbo,4 integer cores;4 FP cores each of which can do 1x128bit ADD and 1x128bit MUL so 256bits wide in SSE code. If AVX is used intel 2500K can execute 4x2x256bits of FP ops in theory.
I hope you see now why FX8xxx series perform like this in some(not all!) FP/SSE heavy workloads. They just have 2x less FP resources than they have integer cores. This is AMD’s design choice since server workloads are mostly integer heavy and those who need FP performance for their HPC server will do a recompile for FMA4/3 path and achieve better performance this way. Desktop users can’t do anything tho,they will have to wait for Steamroller core for more FP performance ;).
Overall,given above limitations FX has,it(FX8120) performs pretty well for its price versus “fat core” design such is 2500K. Not a bad showing when you consider lower stock clock FX has.
The background picture is makes it looks like the items on the top(AMD in this case) have lower performance.
is there any laptops having “fx” series amd processors??if you are having any info about this then please text me via email: [email protected]..
thank you..
aguante amd loco…